More artists every week are disillusioned by the mealy mouthed Perth artscene. Even Perth’s long suffering art dealers occasionally let their frustations with the self congratulatory tedium show. This is particularly true for the generation that came up in the eighties. One highly succesful senior figure who is moving his studio and his life out to the bush has told me, repeatedly, that he has no respect for this culture, does not trust it and will not give it any more of his time. Not a day passes without a younger artist telling me of plans to leave the state for good.

So what’s new?

There has been a huge investment of infrastructure and employment in art in the last decade and none of it has touched the problem. We have an institute of contemporary art that regards artists in the way a dairy farmer does cows, a Festival whose modish contempt for the visual arts has led our Art Galleries Association to decline to collaborate with it next year and a state gallery with almost no interest in local exhibitions and a newspaper with no interest at all in art criticism. No wonder the art community is disintegrating at a remarkable rate and our best art can only be found in garages spare rooms and backyards. This crisis matters, not just for artists but for their shrinking sense of what is possible here.

Artists Melissa Mcdougall and Martin Heine have left just Perth, for Minnesota and Prague respectively. Both exhibited in Perth for decade or more, to regular rave reviews. Yet Mc Dougall is a hardly a household name and Heine has only sold a couple of works in his entire career.

Heine like many younger artists longs for "revenge" on the ghastly good taste he sees everywhere. He is particularly bitter about his persecution, a few years back, by a vicious group of pseudo feminists who objected to his use of images from soft corn pornography in his collages. Only Perth he urges could have nurtured such a nasty brood of bozos unchallenged. Heine argues powerfully that the attack on critical art that began back then was the first sign of the current, shameful monstering of all tolerance. The habit of legitimating nastiness, of policing artists who don’t fit the self righteous calculating careerism all around, has certainly made headway . Heine has made our hypocrits a central concern for his work

He began as a maker of collages and dadaist assemblages. His big breakthrough came when he began to use fly screens damaged in house break-ins as a support for his paintings. He invented a means of using silicone based paint by pushing it through the fly screen holes from the back so that it set with a tapestry like texture and vibrant resonant colour. The symbolic power of his medium and the act painting in reverse seem appropriate Perth. His early fly screen images included corpses hanging from lamp posts along the Terrace and versions of illustrated Black Forest fairy tales filled with cuelty and violence but beautifully textured.

The new work has an undeclared but evocative source - the split beaver shot, the open legged view from soft and hard porn, but each image is so beautifully so carefully worked as colour and texture that its origins are barely visible. Instead one sees a softly modulated colour field, maybe a landscape. supremely sensual. This effect, of dumping the viewers’ desire in an unlooked for but pointed context is as old as Baudelaire’s Fleurs de Mal. Artists have long argued that desire and the erotic are lodged in all experience so that there are no innocent or guilty images only recognition and revelations of the way we live Heine parodies the local taste for prettiness and charm in painting and then rubs peoples noses in the source.

The advent of the Arts Industry new highly efficient system of coordination and control for the visual arts institutions in Perth and the cabal of cliquey curators who run it will almost certainly guarantee that the work of difficult artists like Heine will never be seen by most of the Perth audience. At Christmas he will have a major one person show in Paris, his dealer anticipates a sellout.

Work by Melissa McDougall and Martin Heine can be seen in The Vanishing Mediator exhibition at the Verge inc William St from the 14th of November. McDougall is also on show in Mine Own Executioner at the Mundaring Arts Centre.